The new version of the Linux Kernel 5.5 has already been released and these are its news

After two months of development, Linus Torvalds introduced Linux kernel version 5.5, version in which among the most notable changes, we can find himthe ability to assign alternate names to network interfaces, the integration of cryptographic functions of the Zinc library, the ability to mirror more than 2 disks in Btrfs RAID1, the mechanism to monitor the status of live patches, the kunit unit test framework, the increased performance of the mac80211 wireless stack, the ability to access the root partition via the SMB protocol and much more.

The new version adopted 15505 developer patches, patch size is 44MB (changes affected 11781 files, 609208 lines of code added, 292520 lines removed). About 44% of all the changes introduced in 5.5 are related to device drivers, about 18% of the changes are related to updating the specific code for hardware architectures, 12% are connected to the network stack, the 4% to file systems and 3% to internal kernel subsystems.

Main novelties of the Linux Kernel 5.5

In this new version of the Linux Kernel 5.5 the support for xxhash64, blake2b, and sha256 checksums for the file system Btrfs.

In the implementation of RAID1, it is possible to duplicate data in three (raid1v3) or four (raid1v4) devices (previously mirroring was limited to two devices), allowing you to save data while losing 2 or 3 devices at the same time.

While Ext4 provides the ability to use smaller blocks for encryption (Previously, encryption was done only for blocks whose size matched the size of memory pages (4096)).

En F2FS implements a file pinning mode with alignment along the 2MB edge for placement in a completely correct segment, ensuring the absence of further redistribution of this file by the garbage collector.

Another important novelty is the added support to monitor the status of sensors NVMe device temperature using the hwmon API (compatible with libsensors and the "sensors" command), which does not require elevated privileges to access (previously, temperature information was reflected in the "smart log", which was available only to root).

In addition, as part of the main integration project of WireGuardVPN, many functions of Zinc's crypto library were transferred to the Crypto API standard, including fast implementations of the ChaCha20 and Poly1305 algorithms.

En the KVM hypervisor x86 architecture se provides the ability to process nested five-level tables memory pages and adds support for XSAVES instructions for AMD processors. For ARM64 processors, the ability to transmit time information was added.

Also added support for the blake2b hash function to the crypto subsystem, which provides very high hashing performance while maintaining reliability at the SHA-3 level, as well as a short version of Blake2s.

Another significant change in this new version of the Linux Kernel 5.5 is the new mechanism for assigning alternative names to network interfaces, which allows multiple names to be used simultaneously for an interface (including the use of multiple udev templates).

The name size can be up to 128 characters (previously the network interface name was limited to 16 characters).

To attach an additional name, use the command «ip link prop add" (for example, "ip link prop add enx00e04c361e4c altname someothernamand"). The implementation is based on attaching additional properties to the interface and can be expanded in the future with other parameters, not limited to alternative names.

Finally, if you want to know more about the complete list of changes included in this new version of the Linux Kernel, you can consult it In the following link.

Regarding the availability of the new version, you can download the code to compile the Kernel from its official website or wait for the compiled packages to be included in the repositories of your distribution.